When Patrick Scott has been known to bail me out of a slump in the past, he’s done so with his passel of Old Reliables: Raymond Carver. Flannery O’Connor. Russell Banks. The indisputably great, in other words. So when this time, he sent this recording of a piece by a speculative fiction writer I’d never heard of, my thoughts closed the loop to a circuit with “well, this ought to be interesting” on one end, and “Patrick’s lost his mind in the clamour of his visions of pretty knicker-clad girlies dancing seductively while dressed from the waist-up as sheep.” Patrick, you see, is to be trusted.

And so I pressed an ear to the computer to discover a piece of fiction that might have been conceived when There Will Come Soft Rains had a few bourbons and squeezed the thigh of The Truth and All Its Ugly. That piece then grew up to have its own personality, of course, and is imbued with an innate charm that wells up through its apocalyptic bleakness in a way that shouldn’t even be possible.

Hope you like it, and I’ll be back in a couple of weeks with my own set of pipes in just a couple of weeks. This should give you plenty of time to check out some of Mark Pantoja’s other writing, as well as Patrick Scott’s additional seductions on Zoochosis.